1TB of storage on a phone is now a reality

It is official: both Samsung S10+ and SanDisk microSD have introduced us to a new norm, where our phones will soon be coming with 1TB of storage built in. This incremental, yet monumental, barrier is broken and the future of 4K 2 hour videos shot on the phone is bright. But other than shooting 4K videos, do we really need 1TB on our phones?

Just over a year ago I bought an iPhone X with 256GB of storage (max available at the time) thinking that it would last me at least 3 years. Since then I've racked up 48,767 photos, 875 videos and a good number of apps. Yet I still have 166GB free and on track to have another 2 years of not having storage anxiety. For me this extra cost of 256GB of storage for a piece of mind was worth it. However, if I follow the same pattern of usage the 1TB would last me 12 years. By then I would upgrade my phone over at least once.

This new limit of 1TB of storage makes me wonder about all of the other questions that come with so much memory:

Why bother getting 1TB if you are going to get a new phone every 5 years or so?

Would you still manage or curate your photos, videos, apps? If so then why?

Why bother getting 1TB if you are going to get a new phone every 5 years or so?

I remember being jealous as a kid that one of my friends had a PC with a 20 meg(!) hard drive.

We tend to maximize the storage space we’re given.

What would I do with 1 TB of storage?

I’d wait for some clever chap who can upload vinyl recordings without the compression distortion of mpeg (or whatever the current compression standard is) and I’d fill my phone with a ton of classic recordings like this.

Most of the music you listen to is stored and broadcast in a lossy format, where details are lost and quality is reduced. This is because audio is compressed in order to make it small enough to shove on a phone, or to broadcast over the airwaves.

Very minimalistic 8GB of storage won't get you very far especially if you want to get iOS updates. 😜

iOS 12 upgrade is 2.77GB and needs even more space to unpack it (conservatively 5GB of free space just to upgrade). I'm also a heavy iCloud Drive and iCloud Photo Library user, paying $10 per month for 2TB of cloud storage, yet I can't see myself having a phone with less than 64GB of storage.

Just to give you an example:

If you go on a weekend trip to a national park and plan on taking photos and videos there is high chance of not having reception at all or minimal bandwidth at best. So all of the photos and videos must be stored on your phone until they can be safely backed up to the iCloud. This actually happened to my girlfriend, when she ran out of storage mid hike and had to start deleting old photos on the go. That took away the fun of taking photos and enjoying the views.

It's cool that we're getting huge storage options in phones, but I'll never have a need for so much storage. I'm currently using a phone with 64GB storage. When it fills up, all I need to do is delete my photos and videos since they've been backed up on Google Photos. The only people who might have a need for so much storage are content creators who take literally thousands of photos and videos, or people who horde media on their phones like music, tv shows or movies. But with cloud storage, and like you said, people changing phones every few years, will we actually need that much storage?

> I’d wait for some clever chap who can upload vinyl recordings without the compression distortion of mpeg (or whatever the current compression standard is)

That's been around for years. Take a look at FLAC. It's a lossless compression that unpacks to the original signal on playback. It's also compatible with high resolution audio - the kind you find at places like www.hdtracks.com.

There's also MQA, which Meridian Audio has been pushing in the last few years. It's a compression method that seeks to make streaming high resolution audio more practical. The technology has to be licensed from Meridian, though. I won't get into whether or not it's worth it, since I have no personal experience there.

If you're listening on your phone, though, high quality mp3 is most likely as much as you'll need.

Audiophiles would definitely benefit from that much storage. When it comes to lossless audio like FLAC format taking up six times as much storage as MP3 320, having that 1TB would be handy.

I used to be avid lossless music aficionado buying CDs and ripping them at MP3 320kbps (for convenience) and FLAC (for archival), but then Spotify came along and offered high quality streaming. So just like having an iCloud for backing up my photos and videos, having Spotify no longer necessitates carrying a large collection of songs with me.

If buying lossless audio becomes as easy as streaming (marginally inferior quality) songs from Spotify I would reconsider upgrading and storing my music library. For now, the convenience wins over best possible quality.

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